Books: Prudent Lover

LOVER OF LIFE—Zsolf de Harsanyi—Putnam ($3).

Lover of Life is not to be confused with Irving Stone’s Lust For Life (TIME, Oct. 28, 1935), nor is it likely to be. Both are bio-novels about painters. But about living, Life-Lover Pieter Paul Rubens was measurably less hot under the ruff than Life-Luster Vincent van Gogh, and so is the tone of his story. Comfortably pneumatic as a Rubens model (678 pages), it provides an intricate semiprivate history of its period (1577-1640), a smooth survey course in Renaissance art, and a career which refreshingly breaks most of the rules set down about The Great Artist.

Rubens lived in an age when it was possible for an extravert to be a great painter, and for a great painter to be a great success. He took every advantage of it. He was a cagey businessman, among businessmen who knew and valued good painting when they saw it. He was an apt amateur diplomat in a day when diplomacy was not quite a profession. He was a prodigious worker (average: four to five days per painting, all his life), and he ordered his life to that end. He never drank nor gambled, seldom lunged at his models. He suffered less mental anguish than many a stockbroker, never experienced creative paralysis. He got nearly everything he went after in his life: fame, social standing, money. A faithful husband and a good father, he poured on to canvas what he took care to moderate in his living; his paintings, which lack the deep grandeur of Velasquez and El Greco, are perhaps the most vigorously fleshly ever hung.

Bio-novelist Harsanyi lays out this wholesome career in great detail—more, perhaps, than some laymen will care for. He loves Rubens’ early years in Italy, under the patronage of the Duke of Mantua; the shrewd, rewarding sequel in Antwerp, where his studio became a factory; the courts at Paris, Madrid, London, The Hague, where, while he colored canvas by the bolt, he also did diplomatic errands in the service of his native Flanders.

Rubens’ first wife was perfect in every respect save passion; his second, who was 16 when he married her in his 503, had passion alone to recommend her. But for an aging man who had been careful all his life, that was enough. He painted her as Venus in furs, as all three Graces, and (for her bedroom) as a pornographic maiden attacked by a shepherd. He had had plenty of practice when he received from the King of Spain an order for 112 pictures on Ovid’s Metamorphoses (“Never has any painter received so gigantic a commission”). Before he finished, the King ordered 24 more. Then gout caught Rubens’ hands. Paralysis followed. When he died, he proudly left his family four million guilders. “I love life,” he had once observed, “for life is good, but I love prudently.”